In recent years, mobile wireless communications have become increasingly popular. Initial implementations of mobile wireless communications, for example in the form of cellular telephone networks, supported circuit switched voice communication services. Mobile voice telephone communications is now ubiquitous in many countries, and mobile services are replacing fixed landline service even for traditional voice telephone calls. However, for many years now the mobile service offerings have extended far beyond the traditional voice telephone call model.
For example, the mobile carriers developed short messaging service (SMS) technology to provide text and/or email communications via the wireless communication networks. As the public wireless communication networks have evolved to provide greater bandwidth and packet based services, the industry has developed a variety of data services, such as web browsing, as well as a variety of services using multimedia messaging service (MMS) technology. Many of the messaging services such as SMS and MMS support message traffic between mobile stations, e.g. for message exchange between users. However, these popular messaging services also support traffic between mobile stations and server equipment from which service providers offer users a variety of different types of application services.
The wireless communication service provider needs a way to notify the subscribers of important information such as a billing, and changes of services or terms. Hence, the providers have deployed systems and developed processes to send SMS or MMS messages including the notification information to the subscribers of the wireless communication service. Since the service provider would like to ensure that the SMS or MMS notification messages are read by the subscribers or the mobile station user does not want to be interrupted by receipt of the SMS or MMS notification messages during hours of sleep, it is preferable that the notification messages be sent to the subscribers at easily-acceptable times, such as during business hours (e.g. 9 AM-5 PM).
For a large service provider the messages could be generated and sent to a lot of subscribers or other users at the same time, e.g. from one or more data centers. However, the mobile station users may be located at areas in various time zone, which may differ from the time zone where the equipment sending the notification messages. So, this location of the mobile station users (subscribers) in diverse time zone areas makes it hard for the service provider to consistently send the messages to each of the mobile station users during business hours of their respective areas.
A need exists for a technique for sending notification messages to mobile stations users, for example in SMS or MMS messages, where the users are located in various time zone areas, at acceptable times appropriate for various different users' time zones.